During his recent visit to Napa Valley, Robert Parker tasted through some of our current releases of what we call our ‘Big Reds’. Here are some of his notes from the tasting …

2006 CORLEY RESERVE Cabernet Sauvignon (92) Napa Valley

2006 CORLEY Proprietary Red Wine (89) Oak Knoll District

2006 CORLEY Cabernet Sauvignon – Yewell Vineyard (90+) Saint Helena

2006 CORLEY Cabernet Sauvignon – State Lane Vineyard (89+) Yountville

2006 MONTICELLO Cabernet Sauvignon – Tietjen Vineyard (88+) Rutherford

     One of the finest offerings in this portfolio is the 2006 CORLEY Cabernet Sauvignon Yewell Vineyard (90+) from St. Helena. It offers plenty of spice box, chocolate, new saddle leather, cassis, and black cherry aromas and flavors as well as some serious tannins buried beneath all the fruit. However, this is a deep, rich, convincing wine that will benefit from 3-4 years of cellaring, and last for 15+20 years.     

     Even better is the 2006 CORLEY RESERVE Cabernet Sauvignon (92), probably the best wine I have tasted from Monticello in many years. Its opaque purple hue is accompanied by abundant aromas of charcoal, licorice, black currants, graphite, and a hint of new oak. Full-bodied, layered, expressive, and pure, the copious tannins are well balanced by the richness of the fruit and level of concentration. It needs 2-4 years of cellaring, and should keep for two decades.

     I liked the potential of the deep ruby/purple-tinged 2006 CORLEY Cabernet Sauvignon State Lane Vineyard (89+). Lots of spicy oak, blue and black fruits, camphor, licorice, and underbrush characteristics emerge from this medium-bodied, more elegant, graceful, less concentrated effort. It should drink well for 12-15 years.

     I had some reservations about the 2006 MONTICELLO Cabernet Sauvignon Tietjen Vineyard (88+). The fruit intermixed with earth and lead pencil notes, but the wine reveals aggressive, rustic tannins, and the narrow, rugged finish could turn out to be problematic. 

     The 2006 CORLEY Proprietary Red (89) has sweet fruit, some charcoal, toast, cassis notes, medium to full body, and silky tannins. Drink it over the next 12-15 years.

Posted By : Chris Corley

     We’ve been spending the holidays in New Mexico, enjoying a fresh fall of powdery snow just a couple of days before Christmas. Santa Fe is a wonderful place to be for the holidays. We’ve enjoyed spending time in the plaza and seeing all the beautiful luminarias that are put out on the sidewalks and rooftops for the holidays. These are small brown paper bags by the thousands with candles that are traditionally put out all over the city for Christmas Eve. What a great Christmas spirit this old and historic city has within its thick adobe walls.

ROOFTOP LUMINARIAS – SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

     We’ve also enjoyed having local beers in the local watering holes downtown and drinking Chilean Carmenere and Brazilian Pinot Noir at the oldest restaurant in the city, El Farol, on Canyon Road. I think a couple of glasses of Carmenere even enhanced my appreciation of the beautiful and eclectic artwork that fills the galleries of Canyon Road. El Farol is a very popular place with live entertainment, great tapas, and an interesting South American based wine list. It can be a tough place to get into for dinner, so much so that it even prompted a problem in Game Theory called the El Farol Bar Problem. Game Theory apparently is popular among professional poker players and people who want to have dinner at El Farol during the holidays.

ONE OF THE WALL MURALS IN EL FAROL – SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

     So far, I’ve really enjoyed the beers from Santa Fe Brewing Company, delving into their Pale Ale and “State Pen Porter”. From a little further north, in Fort Collins CO, I had a nice “Cutthroat Porter” from the Odell Brewing Company and ”Seco Stout” from Eske’s Brewery in Taos. I’ve really been enjoying porters this winter with their thick texture and dark smoky, chocolaty malty flavors. I have a 5 gallon batch of porter brewing at home that I hope will be okay until I get back, so have been keen to try as many porters as I can find. I’m going to crack open a bottle of local bubbly this afternoon from the Gruet family winery, and have even seen some locally produced and bottled mimosas and kir imperial, which are variations on the theme of sparkling wines, and something that I’ve thought would be fun to tinker with in our cellar back at Monticello someday.

     In life as in wine, I love to expand my palate and relish every opportunity to engage in new experiences, whether edible, potable, tactile, intellectual or emotional. New experiences are one of the ways to make your dynamo hum, as Frank Zappa would have said. Sometimes you can just make that dynamo hum with a little Brazilian Pinot Noir! 

     Yesterday we visited the Vivac Winery tasting room on Highway 68 on our way back to Santa Fe from Taos. They had a nice big line-up of wines to taste from many different varietals – Sangiovese, Barbera, Nebbiolo, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon to name a few. They had some nice blends as well – Divino and Diavolo. The winery is run by two brothers, who grew up in Dixon, NM and they built the tasting room themselves, which is pretty cool in and of itself. The lady in the tasting room (unfortunately I can’t recall her name) was an excellent hostess and even gave me a couple of homemade sugar cookies for the kids. Great little winery to check out. www.vivacwinery.com .

     I’m looking forward to visiting some more of the local wineries here in New Mexico while we’re out here. I’m interested not just in the technical aspects of the local grapegrowing and winemaking techniques but also to get a glimpse of the people behind the barrels, which is sometimes as much fun as the wines themselves.

Posted By : Chris Corley

     Our family spends a lot of time thinking about what goes into our wines. From the planting of the vines all the way through to bottling, theres no end of decisions to be made which will ultimately result in the quality of the final product. Varietal and clonal selection, trellising technique, viticultural practices, fermentation vessel, yeast, skin contact time, barrel selection and aging regime, and on and on. Thats just the tip of the enological iceberg when it comes to putting wines together from a patch of dirt.

   Spending all this time thinking about what goes into each wine requires us to spend time thinking about what comes out of each wine as well. After all, we’re making wines that will be enjoyed by families around dinner tables, by couples under candlelight, and by someone who just wants to throw their feet up and wind down (wine down?) after a long day. To this end, we do our best to describe what we get out of the wines by writing tasting notes – including descriptions of textures, flavors, aromas, ageability predictions, and suggested food pairings. Winemakers tasting notes can’t always sum up or predict what will come out of each bottle. I can tell you what went into each bottle, and what I get out of it. What you get out of your wine experience is all you, and there are no wrong answers. 

     Tonight we had a bottle of 2000 Jefferson Cuvee Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the first blends I put together as head winemaker at Monticello. The 2000 Jefferson Cuvee was a special wine for me, being one of my first blends as the main dude in the cellar. In addition to having a great texture, deep berry flavors, nice tannin structure and just the right balance of oak – this wine had mojo. I made sure it was in there. We got a lot of snow today in Santa Fe, big fluffy flakes floating down from the sky like miniature parasols. With the snow falling outside, the fire crackling in the fireplace and a big pot of homemade chili on the stove, we had mojo in spades. 

     It got me thinking about how external factors can shape our internal experiences and vice versa. The wine tasted great tonight but I’ve been emotionally invested in it for nearly ten years. Plus, I’m sitting with my wife by the fireplace in the middle of a snowy evening, and the kids are behaving themselves. How could life and taste anything less than perfect right then?  I’ve revisited this same wine recently at my tasting table in my office and it tasted great there as well, but I think it had a little extra mojo this evening. And the more I think about mojo, the more I think its in each of us. We just need to find that place within to let it free. And when we bottle up that mojo at the winery, you can be sure to find it when you pull that cork!

    As the holiday season is here, I hope we can all find our place within and let our bottled up mojo fly free. Happy Holidays to everyone!

Posted By : Chris Corley

Note : As a small family owned and operated business, we hold our staff in very high regard. They are our extended family. We have several staff members that have been with us for 25 years, and many that have been with us more than 10 years. This current series of blogs will introduce our staff members, from all different departments, whom we are so proud to have working with us.

ISAC AVILA, CELLARMASTER

Isac joined our team by working in the vineyard for a season in 1998. He quickly established himself as a smart and motivated team contributor. We were happy to have him join us in the cellar the following year in 1999. As our Cellarmaster, Isac is responsible for many of the details of the daily work we perform in the winery. Among other things, he supervises rackings, oversees wine movements, and ensures that our cooperage is maintained in a healthy manner. He also writes many of the work tags that we use in the cellar that help us track our work with the wines. Keeping track of the wines in the computer is a large task, and Isac’s efforts of documenting everything on work tags is essential for later data entry. When our enologist is occupied, Isac can run several of the tests in the lab to keep things running smoothly in the cellar.

During harvest, Isac keeps things flowing on the crush pad, helping to keep the incoming grapes organized and making sure that the pumpovers and punchdowns are all getting done. When we purchased a new press in 2006, Isac has taken to supervising most of the loads that go through the press, keeping track of the different press cycles and programs that we use for different varietals and styles of wine that we may be making.

Isac devotes most of his time away from work to his family. He and his wife, Yese, have a vibrant and energetic young boy, Leo, and are happily expecting another baby this year. We just had a nice visit from Yese and a happy Leo at the winery yesterday afternoon, both of whom put a smile on everyone’s face. We wish them the best this year as they welcome another addition to their family!

Posted By : Chris Corley

We’re pretty excited about our little hopyard this year. We planted the rhizomes on April 9, just about 6 weeks ago, and they’re growing like crazy. The organic rhizomes we planted were purchased from a farm up in Oregon. The rhizomes are basically just cuttings, and look like dormant roots when you stick them in the ground. A couple of the varietals had us wondering which end was up, and I was actually worried that we stuck a couple of them in the ground upside down. In the end, we got ‘em all right, and they are very happy plants.

FUGGLES HOPS - MAY 26, 2009

We’re growing our hops in barrels alongside the west end of the winery building. It’s a lot easier to train the hops up a string trellis from the roof than to construct a proper hopyard with poles, which may need to be 15-20 feet tall. The growth below is all in the last 6 weeks (from dormancy), so we expect that the hops will work their way up near the roof by the end of the growing season.

MONTICELLO “HOPYARD”

We’ve got 2 barrels each of 5 different ‘varietals’ growing. Fuggles, Northern Brewer, Cascade, Willamette, and Perle. We’re really looking roward to watching them grow this season, and learning about incorporating our own homegrown hops into our homebrews.

RODOLFO CUEVAS – ASSISTANT WINEMAKER, HOPMEISTER

All the guys in the cellar have taken a real ownership of the project and it’s been a fun team-builder in the “offseason”. Each of us planted two hop plants, so we’ve all got a horse in the race. It’s kind of like the game at the carnival, where you shoot water in the clowns mouth to see who can get the whatever up to the top of the line first. In this game, we all win because we’ll get to brew some tasty batches at the end of the season!

Posted By : Chris Corley

Today we planted hops at the winery. The cellar crew and I are going to grow 10 hop plants this year in old wine barrels along the side of the winery building. Last November, we ordered 10 organic hop rhizomes from a grower up in Oregon. They arrived at the winery a couple of weeks ago. We’re growing 5 different varieties – Fuggle, Northern Brewer, Willamette, Perle and Cascade. Below is a picture of the rhizomes as they arrived from the supplier. They’re basically cuttings from established plants.

We pounded out the heads of 10 old barrels and lined them up along the west end of the winery building. The barrels were filled with some of our rockin’ Oak Knoll District dirt from the back of the vineyard mixed in with a little potting soil to help them get started. They’ll get plenty of sun on the west end of the building, and once they’re established should provide some shade and pleasant aromas at that end of the building. Best of all, when they start producing hops, we’ll be able to use these for home-brewing! Isac, our cellarmaster (hopmeister?) tends to the newly planted hops in the picture below.

It will probably take a couple of years for the hops to get established, but we’ve been growing grapes for a long time, so we’ve learned to be patient when starting out new plants. Mature hops can grow very tall, perhaps 15-20 feet in a season, so they need tall wires to be trained up. Growing them next to the building meant that we didn’t have to erect hop poles, which likely would have been a lot of work for this first go-around. We’ll just drop training wires from the roof, which is about 25 feet tall. If all goes well with this batch, maybe we’ll consider putting up some hop pole or tee-pees in the back of the property … we’ll see.

 There are a lot of parallels between wine and beer, and I imagine everyone is the familiar with the old catch phrase ‘It takes a lot of good beer to make great wine!’. We’re firm believers. We’ve been having fun learning about the brewing process, and learning how to grow hops just further enhances our enjoyment of drinking good beers. Hopefully, the fresh hops we grow will enhance our ability to make good beers, and those good beers will lead to great wines!

Posted By : Chris Corley

          I’m pretty good at getting carried away. When I was younger, it got me into a lot of trouble, but I sure had a lot of fun. Over the years, I’m figuring out how to ride that drift to a positive endpoint. During blending trials, my favorite place to be is in the dark – that is, with my eyes closed and both my thoughts and the wine swirling in my head. It’s the most imaginative place to be and the best place for me to find both the good and bad in a given wine.

          Blending is one of the more magical aspects of making wine. It is one of the moments in the winemaking process that you can let your thoughts soar and experience the wine on a truly hedonistic level. For a brief time, you can see the wine as brilliant portrait in your mind’s eye or listen to it as a symphony in your mind’s ear. You can feel the wine as a silken flower on the fingertips of your imagination and dance with it on the winged heels of your dreams. If the canvas is a bit frayed, the orchestra is a little out of tune, or the flower slightly wilted, this inner sanctum is usually where the answer can be found.

          I don’t allow myself to go off the edge, though. When tasting, I like to drift as far as I can, but still be able to find my way back. For me, it’s important to keep lots of tasting notes, so you need to be able to translate these visceral and ethereal thoughts into language that will make sense, at least to your self, if not others. Tasting notes for me are like a anchored tether tied around my waist as I venture deep into a dark cave.

          Tasting wines throughout an aging process is also a journey through time, a conversation with your future self. As I taste a wine in the first month of aging, the notes I make are a communication to my self to be responded to, perhaps 18 months later. It’s interesting having this kind of dialogue with yourself. The response from the future self to the past self is in some ways simply the act of learning – a way of communicating a current experience for the benefit of a positive future action. The inner dialogue amongst the selves is the nip of a creative soul, and also the dynamo that propels us toward more answers and their subsequent questions …

Posted By : Chris Corley

It’s fitting that we’ve had so much rain over the last week. It’s certainly welcome as things have been a little drier than we would like for the last couple of years. Our vineyards on the valley floor soak up the water pretty well. Because our vineyard is pretty flat, we don’t really have erosion problens to speak of, although some friends up on Mt. Veeder have let us know that they’re losing some soil and plants to erosion form some of the recent heavy rains. Our concern is the Napa River, which delineates the rear boundary of our property. We’ve had big trouble in the back of the property when the river has jumped its banks inpast years. So far this year, the rains have been coming in waves that the river has been able to drain everything without any grief. But give us lots of rain and a high tide and we’ll be on alert !

In addition to the recent downpours, there’s a lot of wine being poured around the valley, and we’re happy to be contributing to the cause! With the Napa Valley Vintners annual trade auction ‘Premiere Napa Valley’ coming up this weekend, there are multiple wine tastings being offered around the valley which Monticello will be pouring at.

FIRST TASTE OF YOUNTVILLE   www.yountvillewines.com  Thurs, Feb 19

This afternoon, we’ll be pouring several vintages of our CORLEY State Lane Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon along with a pre-taste of our Premiere Napa Valley lot, which is a unique blend of 85% State Lane Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon & 15% Knollwood Vineyard Syrah. Very tasty, in my unbiased opinion.

APPELLATION ST. HELENA   www.appellationsthelena.com  Fri, Feb 20

On Friday February 20, Dave Yewell and I will be pouring a couple of vintages of our CORLEY Yewell Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. Yewell Vineyard is located on Ehlers Lane a few miles north of St. Helena proper. We’re very happy to be working with Dave and Nancy Yewell and really like the fruit that we get from this special vineyard site.

RUTHERFORD DUST SOCIETY  www.rutherforddust.org  Fri, Feb 20

Also on Friday February 20, my brother, Stephen, will be pouring multiple vintages of our MONTICELLO Tietjen VIneyard Cabernet Sauvignon. Tietjen Vineyard is located on Niebaum Lane in Rutherford, just west of Highway 29. It’s a great site that we’ve been sourcing grapes from for a little over 20 years.

PREMIERE NAPA VALLEY  www.napavintners.com    Sat, Feb 21

On Saturday, we’ll be pouring our wines along with a hundred or so other wineries at a trade-only event put on by the Napa Valley Vintners. Brother Stephen is actively involved as Vice-President, and our dad Jay has served as past President of the Vintners. Brother Kevin has led the charge in recent years as Director of the Beverage Committee for the Napa Valley Wine Auction in June. This year, we’ve donated a 5 case blend of 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15% Syrah from our State Lane and Knollwood Vineyards.

Weather aside, I’m looking forward to the oncoming downpours. These events are always fun and informative, and help to raise the community awareness. Please say hello if you find yourself at any of these events over the next few days …

Posted By : Chris Corley

As I mentioned in my last post, it’s people that make the difference. There are many ways to measure success in any business. This also holds true in the business of wine and grapes. In our family business, we pay close attention to the quality of our wines, the health of our vineyards and our financial statements, as any responsible business owner would. We have another important guage that we pay very close attention to that may set us apart from other wineries. We also measure our success in our people – our extended family. Happy employees that stay with us for a long time are indeed a major satisfaction and an important metric for us to guage how we are conducting ourselves as managers of our company. For this post, as we are just on the tail end of harvest, I’m going to focus on the Cellar Crew. Future posts will be dedicated to our other teams.

CELLAR CREW

“UNCLE” BRIAN CRAWFORD … Uncle Brian (my mom’s brother) really has no title. Over the last 25 years at Monticello, Brian has done just about everything. He has run the frost in the winter, driven the tractor up and down every vineyard row on the property countless times, and literally supervised tens of thousands of tons of our grapes going through the receiving hopper. He built most of the inside of the winery including all of our catwalks and barrel racks. Brian has lived on the property at Monticello – a stone’s throw from the winery for almost 25 years. Brian is known to everyone around Monticello as “Uncle Brian”.

RODOLFO CUEVAS – ASSISTANT WINEMAKER … Rodolfo has worked with Monticello for nearly 18 years. He started in the field, working with the grapes, and moved full time into the cellar about 14 years ago. Rodolfo and I have worked side by side for all of those 14 years. Rodolfo has diligently worked hard over the years, and has performed just about every task imaginable in our cellar. He is currently our assistant winemaker and is also responsible for running our botling line.

ISAC AVILA – CELLARMASTER … Isac has been with Monticello for about 9 years. He manages the daily operations in the cellar, and tracks all the work tags. During harvest, Isac is our PressMaster and supervises all of the grapes that go through the press. This is an important step in the winemaking process, and we’re very happy to have Isac monitoring the pressing of our fruit.

MARK SULLIVAN – ENOLOGIST … Mark joined us as a harvest intern in 2006 and again in 2007. Leading into the 2008 harvest, we hired Mark on full time. Mark tends to all of the fermentation tracking during harvest and performs all of our in-house analysis and prepares our trials tastings. Mark has a degree in Organic Chemistry from UC Davis.

RAFAEL CORTEZ-PEREZ – CELLARMAN … Rafael has worked with Monticello for about 13 years. Most of those years he worked the vineyards as our main tractor driver. He joined our cellar crew a few years ago and has been a great contribution to the cellar. Rafael works diligently at the task at hand. During bottling season, Rafael assists Rodolfo in running and supervising the bottling line.

FEDERICO GUITERREZ – CELLARMAN … Federico has been with Monticello for about 3 years. Federico joined us with little experience but a desire to work hard and learn. He has blended in with the team and has proven to be a very productive and welcome member of our cellar staff.

HEATHER FOSTER – ADMINISTRATIVE … Although Heather isn’t out on the cellar floor, she’s an important part of our Production Team. For the last 2 years, Heather has organized all of our winemaking and packaging compliance, and kept our winemaking records organized and accessible. Her efforts in keeping us organized have been an enormous help.

Here’s to our Cellar Crew! On behalf of my family, I want to say Thank You. We appreciate all that you do, and sincerely hope that we’ll spend many more vintages together. You’ve become part of our extended family …

Posted By : Chris Corley

On Friday, we brought in our last batch of grapes for the vintage. It’s a nice feeling to have all the fruit in for the year. It’s been somewhat of a challenging growing season, but with patience and attention to the details we’ve worked through each challenge, and are extremely happy with the preliminary tastes of the vintage. The reds are concentrated and showing nice fruit and tannin balance. Our Chardonnay lots are showing excellent aromatic complexity and even some nice oak integration, as the barrel fermented lots have now been in barrel nearly a month and a half.

Every year, we tend to the vines and grow the grapes as carefully as we can, all the while showing our respects to Mother Nature. In the cellar, we hover over the tanks and bins, and tend to the barrels with care. However, with each year that goes by, I find more and more aspects of our lives on Big Ranch Road that I take deep satisfaction, pride and pleasure in.

A week or so ago, I was standing on the crush pad, enjoying an extremely rare moment to simply observe the pad as a whole. As I was watching everyone working diligently at their tasks at hand – unloading the bin trailers, weighing fruit, preparing the sorting table, cleaning the press, etc. – I was once again reminded about the single most important aspect of growing and making great wine. People. You’ve got to have people who care about what they do. Otherwise, that shiny piece of stainless steel equipment that you just bought is just an expensive accessory – pretty but kind of useless. People make good things happen, and it’s people that can coerce the magic out of a pile of sticky grapes. People are what counts.

We’ve got a gaggle of geese that spend their autumns in our fallow fields. They like to rummage around in the freshly spread pomace in the mornings and evenings. The sight of them flying through the sunset sky is one of my most memorable visions of harvest. The sound of them flying over my head on the pitch black crush pad before the sun comes up one of my most memorable sounds.

Geese work together. They fly in a formation to help everyone cut through the wind. When one bird gets tired, they switch around and the rested bird takes the lead for a while. A good winemaking team functions much the same way. We help each other and as a team, our individual skills and shortcomings are balanced by one another.

As I was watching the geese recently, it struck me that an upcoming post should be dedicated to our team. So our next post will be dedicated to the 2008 Monticello Harvest Cellar Crew …